What is contemplative computing?

Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.

About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.

My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It's been translated into Dutch (as Verslaafd aan afleiding) and Spanish (as Enamorados de la Distracción); Russian, Chinese and Korean translations are in the works.)

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.

Health / Medicine / Wellness

Georgia State University researcher Susan Snyder is studying the impact of Internet addiction (or PIU, Problematic Internet Use, described as >25 hours/week of non-school or -work use) on family ties. A new article finds that

College students who are addicted to the Internet report positive and negative effects on their family relationships….

On the plus side, these students reported their time on the Internet often improved family connectedness when they and their family were apart. However, their excessive Internet use led to increased family conflict and disconnectedness when family members were all together. And most students with PIU felt their families also overused the Internet, with parents not setting enough limits for either parent or sibling Internet use.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but until I read more, I’ll have to file this under what my mentor Riki Kuklick described as “the power of the social sciences” studies— things like detailed statistical studies of tax records that showed that— TAA-DAA!!!— incomes rose during the Industrial Revolution.

Part of me is also not sure classifying non-work and non-school use as unproblematic, but I’m not sure why.

I've recently been talking to people in locations as far-flung as Finland and Australia about designing programs that support mindfulness and flow, so I suspect there'll be a very diverse set of submissions to the Happiness Apps Challenge:

The Happiness Apps Challenge is an international App building challenge that is aimed to inspire minds in tech and design to create products that will increase world’s happiness quotient!

Create an App to make people happy. One positive person can spread Happiness to more than 1,000 people, but through the power of technology we can reach out to millions.

You have until December 24 to enter. (Check out the some of the ideas for entries.) It'll be very interesting to see how this unfolds.

For years we've heard of doctors having to deal with patients who come into appointments armed with pages of information they found on the Internet. Now, plastic surgeons report that more "patients come to them with selfies they took to show where they think they need improvement," according to Quartz.

An annual study released earlier this year by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that one in three surveyed doctors have seen an increase in requests for surgery due to patients’ dissatisfaction with their image on social media. As a result, the report says, American surgeons saw a 10% increase in rhinoplasty from 2012 to 2013, a 7% rise in hair transplants, and 6% in eyelid surgery.

There has also been an increase in the number of hand lifts ("to 'appropriately' show off their wedding bling," as if the words "appropriately" and "show off" can ever be used together), and neck procedures to get rid of "text neck."

It's not clear if people are getting procedures aimed at making them look better in real life, or if they want to look better on camera-- and are willing to do so at the expense of how they look off-camera. The latter would truly Be A Thing.

There have been a number of studies documenting the effect of meditation on the brain, enough so that the claim that “meditation rewires your brain” is one that we see repeated lots of times. (I talk about it in The Distraction Addiction, and I suppose I’m going to need to talk about it in the new book as well.) Now, the Harvard Gazettereports that "a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)… [have been able] to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter."

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

In this study, they looked at 16 people who participated in the eight week-long Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Each person had an MRI two weeks before and after the program, and they spent about half an hour each day meditating. The team also conducted MRIs on a control group.

The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.

Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.

So what’s new about these findings?

Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

Yale economist Craig Palsson has a new article [pdf] asking whether the growing use of smartphones by parents of young children is responsible for the increased rate of injuries among children younger than 5. While technically the article doesn’t actually say anything about snake pits, the implication is clearly there. Or at least I see it.

I am interested in how smartphones… lead parents to make decisions that increase the risk of child injury. Smart-phones may increase injuries through two mechansims. First, they increase the opportunity cost of supervising children, and the decrease in supervision leads to more injuries. Second, they may decrease the opportunity cost of participating in risky activities, such as playing at the park or pool, and the increased participation leads to more injuries. I investigate both mechanisms and find strong evidence that smartphone adoption has caused child injuries to increase. I also find support that the increase comes from smartphones distracting parents.

It looks in particular at injury rates (as reported by the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System) in areas during Apple’s release of its iPhone and AT&T’s rollout of 3G cell networks. This lets Palsson measure changes in injury rates as people switch from feature phones to smartphone, and presumably have greater opportunities to be distracted by their phones.

So what does he find?

Using the hospital-level variation in 3G access, I find that smartphones increase injuries to children, particularly those younger than five, a group more at risk of injury in the absence of parental supervision. My findings suggest that the expansion of smartphones can explain almost the entire increase in child injuries. Furthermore, I find that injuries increase in riskier activities, when parental supervision can make a decisive role in preventing accidents. These effects are absent in activities where the parents are not the primary supervisors [i.e., school playgrounds that are monitored by teachers] and in activities where supervision makes no difference on outcomes. The evidence from these results strongly supports a scenario where parents are distracted by their smartphones and decrease supervising their children.

Now, it’s worth noting that the study doesn’t try to figure out whether parents were playing Angry Birds or dealing with angry clients: i.e., whether they were distracted by trivial things, or trying to deal simultaneously with the challenges of being parents and professionals or managers.

However, it does seem to me to make a compelling case for the appearance of smartphones causing a measurable increase in distracted parenting.

It’s also the kind of article that has the sorts of parenthetical that only economists can get away with, like "If one assumes a unitary household model, then the increase in injuries is optimal," and "taking time away from watching your daughter color probably will not lead to her getting injured, while not watching her on the playground might,” and my personal favorite, “in the case of Brazil and India, families derived more utility on the margin from watching television than from sex or domestic violence.”

You might have seen articles recently on a case of a man with Google Glass addiction. It’s been written about in the Guardian, BBC, Fast Company, io9, and many other places. They all refer (through each other) to an article to be published in the journal Addictive Behaviors. But if you look a little closer, and read the piece, you find there are both a couple striking details, and some background that makes this story less of a “wearables technology will eat your brain” cautionary tale than first appears.

First, the report comes out of a Navy Substance Abuse and Recovery Program (SARP) based in southern California. The patient was a 31 year-old man who had been wearing Google Glass for up to 18 hours a day for two months, and had to give it up when he entered the SARP program. He "noted significant frustration and irritability related to not being able to use the device during treatment,” and even declared, “The withdrawal from this is much worse than the withdrawal I went through from alcohol.”

But it gets even better:

He noted that when he dreamed during his residential treatment, he envisioned the dream through the device. He would experience the dream through a small gray window, which was consistent with what he saw when wearing the device while awake.

Finally, "When asked questions by the examiner, the patient… [would] reach his right hand up to his temple area and tap it with his forefinger,” automatically turning to Glass to help him answer questions.

As a writer, I can recognize super-evocative details when I see them. The dreaming in a little screen, the complaints about being separated from it, the hyper-reliance on the device for everything—these are awesome details.

But before we jump from this patient to World War Z, it’s worth noting a couple other things.

First, this was the second time he’d been through the SARP program, and the doctors note that

The patient has a history of a mood disorder most consistent with a substance induced hypomania overlaying a depressive disorder, anxiety disorder with characteristics of social phobia and obsessive compulsive disorder, and severe alcohol and tobacco use disorders.

So Google Glass didn’t corrupt a previously-innocent mind; rather, this was someone who already had a lot of issues, technology addiction ranking kind of low on that list.

It’s also worth noting that the authors don’t really make the “man reduced to compulsively-clicking dopamine addict by the Internet” argument that you might see from someone channeling Nicholas Carr or Susan Greenfield. Rather, they take a more, well, clinical view of the problem, and relate it to other examples of addiction. In particular, they note that

Individuals consume alcohol for social motivations, as a coping modality, and for enhancement motives. Similarly, problematic use of technology, and in our case Google Glass, may be driven by similar motives for social motivations, as a coping modality to escape personal deficiencies, and for a desire to improve personal performance. In our patient, he exhibited all of these characteristics.

This is especially notable given that the patient told doctors that “Google Glass increased his confidence with social situations, as the device frequently became an initial topic of discussion."

I think we often talk about the Internet and information technologies as completely autonomous forces, like viruses or radiation: mere exposure is all you need in order to be affected by them. What the authors of this study are arguing is that it’s more complicated than that: in reality, addictions have a social dimension, and they can be pushed along by other psychological issues.

That’s what happened here. It’s not that Glass literally rewired the patient’s brain (it’s a variant of what I call the vitamin theory of interaction), or that these changes are beyond our capacity to resist or change. Rather, like so many other addictions, it sounds it arose in someone who’s fought other addictions, who used it as a coping mechanism, and got some extrinsic reward for doing so.

Psychiatrists in Singapore are pushing for medical authorities to formally recognise addiction to the Internet and digital devices as a disorder, joining other countries around the world in addressing a growing problem.

Singapore and Hong Kong top an Asia-Pacific region that boasts some of the world's highest smartphone penetration rates, according to a 2013 report by media monitoring firm Nielsen.

Some 87 percent of Singapore's 5.4 million population own smartphones as Internet-capable phones with cameras are popularly known….

Tan Hwee Sim, a consultant psychiatrist at The Resilienz Mind clinic in Singapore, noted that the symptoms exhibited by her young adult patients have changed over the years.

Obsession with online gaming was the main manifestation in the past, but addiction to social media and video downloading are now on the uptrend.

"Internet addiction as a disorder is not even listed in our latest psychiatric manual, it's only listed in the appendix as a disorder that requires further study," she said.

In terms of physical symptoms, more people are reporting "text neck" or "iNeck" pain, according to Tan Kian Hian, a consultant at the anaesthesiology department of Singapore General Hospital.

"It is a commonly observed phenomenon that many people have their heads lowered and are now using their mobile devices constantly on the go, while queuing or even crossing the roads," Tan told AFP.

Apparently, the first Kegel trainers were developed in the 1940s using "an air pressure balloon and a tire gauge," and haven't evolved much since then. But given that "Strong pelvic floor muscles are a critical part of a healthy body," and play a role in healthy childbirth and postpartum recovery, bladder control, and posture and balance, there's no reason it shouldn't be taken seriously.

The Guardian reports on a recent report from the “centre-right Policy Exchange think tank… [that] recommends £875m should be spent on training the 6.2 million mainly elderly people who are without basic digital skills.” The basic idea is that lots of elderly people suffer from loneliness and restricted mobility, and that learning to use the Web would make elders at least more virtually mobile, and more connected.

Roehampton University professor Ros Coward says, not so fast. “Anyone who has spent time with elderly people,” she argues, "knows the real issues are much more complex:"

Loneliness among the elderly is also to do with poverty and declining health. On the one hand, financial hardship restricts their activities; on the other, it increases frailty – including the loss of mobility, eyesight or memory, all of which undermine confidence when moving around in the wider community.

It is often these other factors that will restrict access to the internet, even for those who might once have been able to use it. To access the internet, you need money, or skilled neighbours and friends, to fix glitches; you need eyesight to read screens and memory to recall passwords.

My father-in-law runs the tech support program at his retirement home, and his description of the work has made me rethink some of my assumptions about technology and the elderly. For one thing, many of these people were at the peaks of their careers when personal computers came into the workplace, so they’re not Unfamiliar With Technology. They also tend to need help with the same kinds of things that tech support in your average office has to deal with— e.g., figuring out how to get an operating system patch so you can get the latest printer driver to run the printer that was installed over the weekend, which doesn’t run the old driver but no one mentioned that. And for many the tech support is more like a maid service than full-time nursing: that is, you call on it not because you’re feeble, but because you calculate that it’s worth it to outsource this task.

Reading and sending work email on a smartphone late into the evening doesn’t just make it harder to get a decent night’s sleep. New research findings show it also exhausts workers by morning and leaves them disengaged by the next afternoon.

That means the way most knowledge workers do their jobs—monitoring their iPhones for notes from the boss long after the office day is done and responding to colleagues at all hours—ultimately makes them less effective.

The researchers conducted two studies. The first was with 82 managers who "were asked every morning how many minutes they used their smartphone after 9:00 pm the night before and how many hours they slept," and surveyed about their attitudes and energy level. The second study "measured how late-night tech use—on smartphones, laptops, tablets and TV—can disrupt sleep and next-day work engagement" for 161 workers.

Smartphones have become a prevalent technology as they provide employees with instant access to work-related information and communications outside of the office. Despite these advantages, there may be some costs of smartphone use for work at night. Drawing from ego depletion theory, we examined whether smartphone use depletes employees’ regulatory resources and impairs their engagement at work the following day. Across two studies using experience sampling methodology, we found that smartphone use for work at night increased depletion the next morning via its effects on sleep. Morning depletion in turn diminished daily work engagement. The indirect effects of smartphone use on depletion and engagement the next day were incremental to the effects of other electronic devices (e.g., computer, tablet, and television use). We also found some support that the negative effects of morning depletion on daily work engagement may be buffered by job control, such that depletion impairs work engagement only for employees who experience low job control.

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been around for a few years. You've probably seen them, or at least seen a doctor access them: at my doctor's office every exam room has a PC, which the doctors and nurses can use to access my file, send prescription orders to the pharmacy, and probably let the NSA know how healthy I am. (It would be amazing if the NSA was not collecting EHR data, come to think of it.)

Northwestern professor Enid Montague and University of Wisconsin graduate student Onur Asan recently published a study of how interaction with EHRs can affect the way doctors and patients communicate. They videotaped 100 patients visiting 10 doctors, and monitored how much doctors and patients interacted with each other, versus how much either of them looked at the computer. The displays were "located on the wall between patient and the physician and facing toward them." I e-mailed Dr. Montague about the setup, and he kindly shared a picture of the setup. The display was mounted above a desk on an articulated arm, the sort you can pull out and swivel. The mouse was on the desk, and the keyboard on a pull-out tray underneath.

We found that physician–patient eye-gaze patterns are different during a visit in which electronic health records versus a paper-chart visit are used. Not only does the doctor spend less time looking at the patient, the patient also almost always looks at the computer screen, whether or not the patient can see or understand what is on the screen.

Doctors spent about a third of their visits looking at EHRs rather than patients (they spent about 8% of their time looking at paper charts, in contrast), which meant less attention to nonverbal cues and body language. This is important because, as Montague and Asan explain in the (firewalled) article (free abstract here):

posture and body language can provide indications of comfort or satisfaction, facial expressions can provide more objective assessments of satisfaction or emotional state, and eye gaze can illustrate attention to people or other artifacts.

In other words, EHRs tend to distract doctors from paying attention to patients, and picking up on things that they might have noticed when working with paper. Further, patients tend to take their attentional cues from doctors: as they put it, "Physician gaze largely influences patient gaze in the primary encounter."

But these effects seem to me more an artifact of the technology, and the ergonomics of interacting with PCs, than a necessary consequence of records becoming "electronic." As anyone who's worked with students in a computer lab and with tablets can testify, having to talk to students around monitors that are set up to block their view of the front of the room literally offers more obstacles than engaging students whose screens are on their desks. So it would be interesting to see how tablets versus desktop machines affect doctor-patient interactions.

Another obvious thing to investigate would be views of information that are meant to be shared by doctor and patient-- in effect, visualizations that are meant to be explained by the doctor. Rather than being things the patient can't understand, and which subtly reinforce the authority of doctors by highlighting patients' ignorance, such interfaces could be useful prompts for more interaction. But whatever design improvements come, they should be focused on the doctor:

any intervention to increase eye contact, or EHR information sharing, will likely need to be targeted to the physician. These findings illustrate the importance of designing work systems that allow and encourage physicians to be patient centered. [emphasis mine]

The findings also echo the work that Richard Harper did in the late 1980s on the ways automating police note-taking and reporting could negatively affect interactions between police and victims or witnesses. Lots of early police automated systems were essentially digital forms, which you can imagine would be pretty useful in streamlining paperwork, reducing bureaucracy, etc.;' but it turns out that for some victims and witnesses (who might have just gone through something pretty traumatic), having the officer typing or trying to figure out what field they should be entering information into was very off-putting. For police, the systems meant more attention on screens and fields, and less time listening to stories, watching to see if someone seemed especially nervous of suspicious, etc.. Reducing police investigations to automated note-taking didn't do anyone any good.

Tech writer Michael Thomsen has a piece in Complex Tech about a new iPhone app that "wants to make you a better lover." Inevitably named Spreadsheets, it uses your phone's accelerometer and microphone to measure how, umm, active and nosiy one is in bed. Leaving aside the question of how useful volume is as a measure of satisfaction ("Oh yes Yes YES" and "watch the hair OWW!" are equivalent if they're said at 80 decibels), Thomsen notes a more general objection to apps like these:

when we depend on apps for advice about self-improvement, we are always dooming ourselves to remain in the present, marginally changed on a personal level, paid for by deferring consideration of just how many different options there are communally. And in that way we come to serve, not our little devices, but the powers that brought them into being, blaming our feet for the potholes in the road.

Put another way, the apparent neutrality and objectivity of measurement hides a whole world of decisions about what should be measured, and what counts as improvement, not to mention what defines "self."

Linda Stone, who gave us the idea of continuous partial attention and email apnea, has a new essay outlining her idea for an Essential Self movement:

The entire Quantified Self movement has grown around the belief that numbers give us an insight into our bodies that our emotions don’t have.

However, in our relationship with technology, we easily fall out of touch with our bodies. We know how many screen hours we’ve logged, but we are less likely to be able to answer the question: “How do you feel?”...

What if we could start a movement that addresses our sense of self and brings us into a more harmonious relationship with our bodymind and with technology? This new movement would co-exist alongside the Quantified Self movement. I’d like to call this movement the Essential Self movement.

She's right that these are two approaches that need not be competitive, though we can practice them in opposition to one another. In The Distraction Addiction, I talk about how doing simple measurements of things like the amount of time you spend online, the number of times you check your email, and so on can be quite illuminating: as Mónica Guzmán put it, "technologies breed new attitudes and habits so fast, sometimes, they hide" from us, becoming time-consuing habits without our really noticing. And noticing is the first step toward using them more thoughtfully.

And part of what Linda is advocating with the Essential Self are not technologies that just help us reflect on our state of mind, or how we feel, but can also change and improve them.

Some of these technologies work with light, music, or vibration to support “flow-like” states. We can use these technologies as “prosthetics for feeling” — using them is about experiencing versus tracking. Some technologies support more optimal breathing practices. Essential Self technologies might connect us more directly to our limbic system, bypassing the “thinking mind,” to support our Essential Self.

One of my favorite places in the world is Edinburgh. I first went there in graduate school, and spend several days at the Royal Observatory, and several nights wandering around; more recently, my wife and I spent a great weekend there when we were on sabbatical.

Scientists have known for some time that the human brain’s ability to stay calm and focused is limited and can be overwhelmed by the constant noise and hectic, jangling demands of city living, sometimes resulting in a condition informally known as brain fatigue…. But an innovative new study from Scotland suggests that you can ease brain fatigue simply by strolling through a leafy park.

Researchers... at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh attached... portable EEGs to the scalps of 12 healthy young adults. The electrodes, hidden unobtrusively beneath an ordinary looking fabric cap, sent brain wave readings wirelessly to a laptop carried in a backpack by each volunteer.

The researchers, who had been studying the cognitive impacts of green spaces for some time, then sent each volunteer out on a short walk of about a mile and half that wound through three different sections of Edinburgh….

What they found confirmed the idea that green spaces lessen brain fatigue.

When the volunteers made their way through the urbanized, busy areas, particularly the heavily trafficked commercial district at the end of their walk, their brain wave patterns consistently showed that they were more aroused and frustrated than when they walked through the parkland, where brain-wave readings became more meditative.

Frank Lloyd Wright said it best: “If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." Technology permeates every corner of our universe: our homes, our cars, our sidewalk strolls, even our free time. Like any healthy relationship, our daily interaction with technology (particularly with our handheld devices) should be guided by moderation and balance. If we approach technology use mindfully, we can be more productive, think more clearly, and best of all—we can feel happier doing it.

When I was interviewing people who take digital Sabbaths, one of the ways they often described themselves was as spiritual, but not particularly religious. I puzzled over this a bit, talked to a rabbi about what he thought it meant, then moved on. But (via Damon Young) I saw a piece by Mark Vernon on a new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry that found that people who describe themselves as "'spiritual but not religious' are more likely to suffer
poor mental health:"

Michael King of University College London and his colleagues examined
7,400 interviews with folk in Britain, of whom 35% had a religious
understanding of life, 19% a spiritual one and 46% neither a religious
nor spiritual outlook. The analysis led to one clear conclusion. "People
who have a spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a
religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder [dependence on
drugs, abnormal eating attitudes, anxiety, phobias and neuroses]." The
work supports evidence from other studies too.

Go read the whole thing. I'll just flag one more bit:

the research challenges the stance of those who are spiritual but not religious. It might be called the individualism delusion, the conviction that I can "do God" on my own. And yet, as the psychotherapist Donald Winnicott argued, human beings need to work through traditions to resource their personal creativity. Only in the lives of others can we make something rich of our own life. To be spiritual but not religious might be said to be like embarking on an extreme sport while refusing the support of safety procedures and the wisdom of experts who have made the jump before. Spirituality is like love: more risky than you can countenance when you're falling for it.

In the Bay Area, what starts out as counterculture eventually becomes a commodity. It's inevitable, and not a bad thing: indeed, the counterculture has always had an entrepreneurial dimension.* Journalist Jessica Yadegaran has a piece in the Mercury News about Digital Detox, an East Bay-based company that organizes device-free retreats in Ukiah and other places. So far as I can tell, it's the first company built around structured, guided unplugging:

Levi Felix started Digital Detox, a company in Oakland, as a way to help people disconnect from their gadgets in order to reconnect with themselves. A casualty of the tech industry, Felix had his own aha moment after 80-hour work weeks at a startup put him in the hospital with an esophageal tear and internal bleeding his doctors said were caused by stress and poor lifestyle.

After a two-year stint traveling the world, which included managing a retreat in Cambodia,

Felix and [Brooke] Dean returned home to create digital-free retreats where anyone, from stay-at-home moms to Google (GOOG) executives, could disconnect from technology and recharge through hiking, journaling, art and massage.

"There's no seat belt or smoking section for the digital world," Felix explains. "It's not that all of these digital technologies are bad. But humans have never lived in a situation like this, and we need help to reconnect in a more meaningful way."

In a way the Digital Detox events are a local version of the "detox tourism" that's sprung up in South Asia in the last few years, in which resorts and monasteries offer Western (and well-off Chinese) visitors the chance to break free of drug and device addictions.

Some participants rave about the retreats: Jon Mitchell called his "the highest-tech thing I’ve done in a long time:"

That's right — retreating to a natural hot spring tucked away in a valley with no computers is high tech, and the 12 of us who attended this long weekend are lucky early adopters. We downloaded new versions of ourselves. Now that I’m finished installing mine, I’m back online, but it’s going to be different now.

I'm intrigued by commercial events and retreats like this (though I also think we have a lot to learn from religious sabbaths), and I wonder whether alumni take up new daily practices, go on annual retreats, or what. It's easy to leave an extraordinary few days feeling changed and charged, but to have the real world intrude unhappily after a few weeks; knowing how people manage the transition from retreat to real world would be interesting.

Felix and Dean also started an evening-long "Device-Free Drinks events, where people trade in their cellphones for analog activities, like board games and playing on typewriters."

"Instead of staring at your phone or checking in online, you're meeting new people and having fun," Felix says. The bar events have drawn at least 200 people a night since launching last October.

The New York Times' Andy Isaacson talked about these events last month, at which people trade their devices for "board games, butcher paper and markers, colored threads for friendship bracelets." It may sound silly, but people need it:

Jana Kantor, who had volunteered to check in the devices, thought she had seen the unpretty face of addiction. “One woman told me, ‘My whole life is on this phone,’ so I said, ‘That’s something interesting for you to think about: is your whole life data, or is it your body?’ ”

In the heart of the Valley of Digital Distractions, mindfulness is the latest coin of the realm.

"The speed at which information is coming at us can get overwhelming," says Google's Gopi Kallayil, a marketing manager for Google+ who also teaches a popular weekly yoga class for stressed-out Googlers. "I'm seeing more and more people in Silicon Valley moving to yoga as a centering, anchoring ritual because it gives them a respite from that relentless onslaught."

From Google's "Optimize Your Life" program that helps employees unplug from the digital grind, to the valley darling Asana, a Web-based productivity-services firm that lists "Mindfulness" at the top of its corporate-values list, everyone's getting into the awareness-raising act….

Deborah Burkman, who leads yoga retreats and "urban-wellness" programs for companies, has been teaching meditation at Twitter, the microblogging behemoth that practically embodies the frenetic digital drill so many people are caught up in.

"Twitter's really into this," she says. "There's a whole mindfulness program they're trying to build there. Like a lot of companies, they're concerned about the well-being of their employees, and they're big believers in trying to have people be consciously connected."

Problems keeping technology in balance aren't specific to the United States, according to Northern Ireland business Web site Business First Online:

While technology ownership in Ireland has seen swift growth, with 60% of NI (Northen Ireland) and 51% of RoI (Republic of Ireland) consumers owning smartphone and a further 18% of Irish technology loving consumers saying they plan to buy one by the end of 2012, it seems today’s technology is not without its pitfalls.

Indeed it seems technology may be taking its toll on the physical health of the nation as today over one in ten (12% RoI and 11% of NI) of Irish consumers claim that technology and the internet has negatively affected their sleeping habits.

Indeed, new research from Mintel’s Irish Lifestyles report, examining the impact of technology on Irish consumer habits finds that some consumers may in fact be over-reliant on being online, with some 18% of consumers feeling a sense of anxiousness when they are ‘cut off’ from technology and the internet.

According to Brian O’Connor, Research Manager, Mintel Ireland:

“Consumers are getting less sleep because they don’t want to switch off from technology. Between on-demand TV, addictive video games and the constant bombardment of information from the internet, consumers are finding it harder to pull away from technology and get a full nights rest. In the end, the more consumers use technology, the more anxious they are likely to be when ‘cut-off’.”

"We have had patients who have reported sending text messages to their friends and family while asleep," he said.

"It is one of those things that happens, but it is very rare, and certainly not a common trend."...

Dr Cunnington said cases of sleep emailing were more common and were likely to have a more detrimental effect on the lives of sufferers.

"Emails can be sent to work colleagues and have much more serious consequences, whereas text messages are more likely to be accidentally sent to a friend or family member, so people aren't as likely to complain of a problem," he said.

Dr Cunnington described sleep texting as the result of people having too much to do during waking life.

"People are doing so much during a normal day that it can mean that they feel like they're 'on call' even at night," he said.

"Because it's so easy to receive emails constantly, and get notifications from smartphones, it becomes more difficult for us to separate our waking and sleeping lives."

Part of what's interesting about this is that sending a text isn't that easy: one person

sent two multimedia text messages, apparently after falling asleep during an exchange with her boyfriend.

The first began “Baby u there? Need to tell somethin ..." before it turned into nonsense.

To do so, she had to navigate 11 different stages, excluding the typing.

According to a study done by Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, young adults send approximately 3,200 text messages each month. Now, a growing number of people are starting to send texts in their sleep.

People have reported that they send text messages in the middle of the night and have no memory of it in the morning. Sometimes, sleep texts are logical messages, but they can also make little sense.

"My roommate wakes up to texts in the middle of the night, starts to answer with gibberish and then falls back asleep," said Jessica McAllister, junior in elementary education…. "It just shows that our daily addictions become ingrained in our subconscious to the point where we automatically do this without even knowing," said Richard Kim, senior in architectural engineering….

Cunnington and other researchers suggest that those who are suffering from sleep texting should leave their phone outside of the bedroom for a better night's sleep.